“I have always been trying to see how far I can go,” says Immer. “I guess it stems from watching so many extremely violent movies when I was younger. I like to push the violence so far that you will look at it and not be disturbed.”
In his paintings, creatures that look freshly plucked from a toddler’s toy box are skinned and laid bare, their innards a cartoony gore fest of pastel and neon.
In another painting, a glassy-eyed skeleton plucks tiny fairy creatures from their grassy island homes and rips off their delicate heads, with a swift bite of bony jaw (Skeleton Snacks). The resultant bloodshed is massive.
And in another, an Easter Egg-like bauble with spaghetti arms hovers through an anemone forest, pausing only to snatch an eyeball from an unsuspecting fellow Easter Egg (whose teeth, by the way, are sharp and menacing as a moray eel’s).
“I am really into transparency and slime and water,” says Immer, who cites Dave Cooper, Travis Lampe and Mark Ryden as influences. “I like that when you tear my characters apart there’s sinew and veins and blood,” Immer continues. “It looks like candy to me…sort of delicious.”
Based in Brooklyn, Immer has just released his first set of prints, of his fantastic painting Elk Puke. It shows an ethereal forest elk in Damien Hirst-like relief, sliced in half, and literally barfing its bloody guts up. (You can buy a print at Bold Hype.net.)
“Elk Puke…that was actually my breakthrough painting that I did when I was at Rhode Island School of Design about three years ago,” says Immer. “I just wanted to do my own take on a forest spirit having a real emotional outpouring. It’s like he’s sick of everything, and his guts are coming out. I like that you can see through him and you can see what’s inside of him at the same time. Yeah…I really like that.”
--by Caroline Ryder / Hurley Art
